


the chains they revere

by gogollescent



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-07
Updated: 2013-05-07
Packaged: 2017-12-10 16:05:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/787898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-script to episode 17: Shiori finds Juri exactly where she left her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the chains they revere

Juri wakes up on her back. It’s night-time, and the sky beyond the high windows of the dueling hall has darkened like paper. She sits up and the pendant clatters out of her hand: the chain still looped around her numb fingers. She can feel a hollow behind her ribs, a weightlessness contained, and remorsefully she lifts the necklace and lowers it over her head. 

“Juri,” says a voice from the opposite end of the hall. It’s Shiori; shadowy, small, wearing a uniform Juri doesn’t recognize—or is that a costume she’s seen before, when they were children playing as soldiers? The color of the jacket is the same as Shiori’s hair. In this light, violet.

“What do you want now?” says Juri. Moonlight presses on her like a hand.

“Oh,” says Shiori, as though hurt: and then, “I wish I knew.” She crosses the floor unbelievably quickly, before Juri can rise, and puts her knee on Juri’s fingers, stopping her. “Won’t you stay? I’ve had the strangest evening.”

“Here?” says Juri, which isn’t the question she should be asking. That would be, Really? or, Was it the part where you yanked a serviceable longsword out of my chest? How there was room, she doesn’t know. She pictures it standing inside of her, the folded steel forged by heat running along her spine, hammered by a strong heart, and then quenched again in the coldness of her blood. No surprise, perhaps, if it’s now harder to firm her backbone. 

“I can’t remember it,” says Shiori, answering the unspoken words. “Any of it. Isn’t that weird?” 

No, thinks Juri, remembering Miki; remembering Kozue, so sick-faced and withdrawn. Hate creeps up on them all. She doesn’t believe in miracles, but sometimes it seems miraculous that they should be so entrenched in dense, impermeable misery, each binding strand unique though merciless. She knows no-one who’s happy. Not even Utena Tenjou, with her generous advice and her eyes that grow luminous after dusk, can laugh as easily these days, and when she does it’s a short, difficult bark, incredulous and wary. Juri wonders how she reacted to Shiori’s appearance at the tower, after all the help Utena gave her—pleading her way back into Juri’s good graces! It would be funny if it weren’t so foul.

“What’s the last thing you do recall?” she asks.

“You,” says Shiori. “Coming to you, and showing you—that pendant.” Her expression becomes momentarily tender, like a dragon’s over its hoard. Juri resists the urge to look down and see whether the necklace is showing above the line of her shirt, or whether the heavy metal’s slid down into safety and the blindness of cloth. “And—” She begins to look confused. “I went to have an interview,” she says, and quietens.

“It’s just as I thought,” says Juri. She turns her face away. It’s not malicious—just habit, animal self-defense. But Shiori takes it wrong. 

“Of course it is,” she says sweetly. “Where would we be if Juri Arisugawa didn’t always know what was happening?” She grips the hair at the back of Juri’s head, sudden and hard, and draws her face back around to catch her mouth a glancing blow. “Look at me!” she orders Juri, licking her lips, the last traces of make-up greying the corners of her mouth. As though she’s been trying to swallow a coal-lump too large to get down. “Isn’t that what you’re always doing? Mooning over my picture like some kind of vampire? Well, here I am—and I’m prettier now!” She has the air of someone who’s lost everything. 

“All right,” says Juri. She tries to collect herself. She can smell Shiori’s breath, scented with roses—it should be pleasant, but Juri thinks of corrupted briars growing up through Shiori’s thorax, overrunning stomach and throat. The cluttered ferocity of the interior: vine and blood-slick walls.

“Are you looking?” says Shiori. “What do you think?”

“You’re beautiful,” says Juri, which has always been true. Today Shiori’s shallow, clear eyes are close to indigo, while her curls cluster richly at the corners of her face, casting elaborate shadows on her cheeks and the inside of her nose. What silver light disturbs the gallery’s gloom is just sufficient to etch the sharpness of her profile in acid on the underside of Juri’s eyelids. “I missed you, I’m afraid.” Her hand is starting to fall asleep from the pressure of Shiori’s leg.

Shiori kisses her blankly, the quick mouth hot and sleek. She’s all business: betray, seduce. Juri is going to fall asleep at this rate, too. She risks her free hand on Shiori’s epauletted shoulder, her palm caressing brass in place of skin; Shiori cringes without breaking the embrace. It’s nothing like Juri dreamed. She’d thought of Shiori flushing, apologizing, delicate in an Ohtori skirt and blouse, her purple hair spread out on the pillow like a dropped fruit; she’d thought of how pale Shiori would go if Juri, gentle, brushed tough duelist’s knuckles across the inside of her knee. Truthfully, in her dreams they were young in a way she’d never had access to, infused with purity that could survive the years. Anything but this desperate scramble on a tiled floor where Juri’s used to victory, play-fights, a war with her own weakness that goes back to earliest childhood, when she first stepped out of her shoes and put on the fencer’s mask.

“Shiori,” she says, moving aside, “maybe we should—” go to my room, she might say. Walk a while, or sit under the lilac trees where you claim you have so many memories. But as she shifts toward the window, with its comforting view of the grounds and the bridge, Shiori takes hold of the chain around her neck and wrenches it back. “Ah!” says Juri, all the air forced out of her lungs by Shiori’s other arm around her waist, and when Shiori stands she’s half-dragged up to her knees, her head thrown sideways and her cheek against Shiori’s thigh, to ease inhalation. Eyes streaming, she can make out the distant vaulting of the roof, the nearer dip of Shiori’s jaw; Shiori looking this way and that to make sure no one’s watching. How odd that she should care about witnesses at this late stage. She’s twisting, nervously, the metal links, and the length of the necklace bites into Juri’s windpipe like a girl’s teeth. It’s an ornamental approach to homicide. 

Shiori says, “Why aren’t you _fighting me_?”

Juri has to admit: it didn’t occur to her to try. She let Shiori touch her without flinching, and she busted out a sword for her without Shiori doing more than palming her sternum; she retains no delusions about the strength of her will. Well—not too many. She starts to speak, but it comes out a hiss. 

Ridiculously, Shiori drops her. She falls flat on her face, hurting her nose in the process, and when she’s climbed up onto all fours Shiori is still talking. “—you’re so brilliant, with so much to live for, and you can’t even talk me out of killing you? No wonder I want to blot you out! You’re like a firefly—no lasting power. A bug!”

“Were you really going to kill me?” says Juri, when she can breathe again. The pendant is swinging free below her collarbones, and it bounces, once, off her breast. 

Shiori deflates. “No,” she says. “I just thought it would be sexy.”

Juri sits back on her heels and stares. Shiori shrugs. “Girls always like it in porn,” she says. “Your boyfriend and I used to watch it together. ‘Harder, Mr. Executioner!’” She mimes a noose.

“He was never my boyfriend,” says Juri, for lack of a better response. 

“Well, whatever,” says Shiori. “I can pretend, can’t I? Shall I tell you about him?” She plops down in front of Juri neatly, crossing her legs. One of the buttons on her strange jacket has come loose and is hanging by a thread. Juri burns, with awful fervor, to snap it off and slide her fingers into the gap. She watches Shiori’s hands instead. They make a cage, and then a cup, beneath the tuck of her small breasts; then settle on her thighs. “He said I was the only girl he could really talk to.”

Juri was unable to talk to Shiori even when they were in elementary school. They sat sometimes for hours in sunlit silence, dappled by the shadows of leaves; like a generous moneylender had filled their laps with dark, burnt coin. Those black sigils, she thinks, the sooty rings. “What about? Asphyxiation?”

“Love,” says Shiori, so Juri doesn’t reply. She rubs her hand down her sore throat, digging into the bruise.


End file.
